Obama cancels Putin meeting

President Barack Obama is canceling his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin that had been set to take place in Moscow next month amid the fallout from Putin’s decision to offer temporary asylum to Edward Snowden, the White House said Wednesday.

The White House said Russia’s decision to grant asylum to Snowden was just the latest indicator for the administration that talks with Putin this fall would not be productive, officials said. After modest successes during Obama’s first term, meetings with Russia over the past year have been less successful, ending without progress on issues including missile defense, trade and human rights.

“We have reached the conclusion that there is not enough recent progress in our bilateral agenda with Russia to hold a U.S.-Russia Summit in early September,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said in a statement Wednesday.

The president and his top advisers agreed, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes told The Associated Press. “It was the unanimous view of the president and his national security team that a summit did not make sense in the current environment,” Rhodes said.

Obama said in an interview Tuesday that he was “disappointed” by the Russian government’s decision to grant a one-year asylum to Snowden, the former national security contractor who released classified documents and that Putin’s move reflected lingering tensions.

“There have been times where they slip back into Cold War thinking and a Cold War mentality,” he said on “The Tonight Show.” “And what I consistently say to them, and what I say to President Putin, is that’s the past and we’ve got to think about the future, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to cooperate more effectively than we do.”

“A lot of what’s been going on hasn’t been major breaks in the relationship,” but smaller tiffs, the president added. Despite that, he said, “there’s still a lot of business that we can do with them.”

Putin’s foreign affairs adviser, Yuri Ushakov, told reporters Wednesday that the Kremlin was disappointed by the White House’s decision, which he said was “clearly linked” to granting asylum to Snowden, according to the AP. Russia has contended that it had no choice but to take in Snowden, since the United States and Russia don’t share an extradition agreement.

The president’s move, Ushakov said, reflects Washington’s struggles to build a relationship with Russia on an “equal basis.” Still, he said, the Kremlin will continue working with the Obama administration, and the invitation for the president to meet with Putin still stands.

Obama will still travel to Russia in September for the G-20 summit in St. Petersburg but does not plan to have a one-on-one meeting with Putin there.

Rather than framing the White House’s move as an outright cancellation, Carney said the administration has “informed the Russian government that we believe it would be more constructive to postpone the summit until we have more results from our shared agenda.”

The Snowden controversy also played a role in the White House move. “Russia’s disappointing decision to grant Edward Snowden temporary asylum was also a factor that we considered in assessing the current state of our bilateral relationship,” Carney said.

Still, cooperation with Russia on key issues “remains a priority,” said Carney, and Friday’s meeting between Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and their Russian counterparts will take place as scheduled “to discuss how we can best make progress moving forward.”

Instead of traveling to Moscow, Obama will spend two days in Stockholm, Sweden, before heading to the summit. “Sweden is a close friend and partner to the United States” and “plays a key leadership role on the international stage,” Carney said in a separate statement.

The immediate reaction to Obama’s choice from lawmakers in both parties was positive.

“The president clearly made the right decision,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement. “President Putin is acting like a schoolyard bully and doesn’t deserve the respect a bilateral summit would have accorded him.”

House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce (R-Calif.) sounded a similar note. “This should help make clear that the Russian government’s giving Edward Snowden refugee status is unacceptable,” Royce said in a statement. “Snowden should be sent to the U.S. to defend his actions in a U.S. court of law.”